Socialist favored to win in Uruguay / Country hit hard by recession votes today for president

Hector Tobar, Los Angeles Times

Published
4:00 am PST, Sunday, October 31, 2004

2004-10-31 04:00:00 PDT Montevideo, Uruguay -- Standing in the central plaza of the neighborhood of humble homes known as La Teja, an old leftist militant points out monuments in the life of Tabare Vazquez, the local hero favored to win today's presidential election.

"That building is La Escuela Yugoslavia, where Tabare went to grade school," said Alvaro Medino, who runs a nonprofit radio station. "Over there is the Arbolito Sports Club, where he started the clinic after his father died of cancer. ... And the night he was elected mayor, this was where we celebrated."

If Vazquez is elected and brings the left to power for the first time in Uruguay, it will mark the culmination of a rags-to-riches story that began here amid the shuttered factories and the flare of the state oil company refinery, where his father once worked.

Vazquez's campaign officially closed Wednesday night with a rally attended by about 250,000 people. Expectations are high in this capital that a leader with plebeian roots will bring change to a country of 3.5 million people hit hard by years of recession.

"What we need is to give people ... work and not abandon these young people," Medino said as a group of children walked past Plaza Lafone.

A number of polls released Thursday -- the last day campaigning was allowed -- showed Vazquez with the support of more than 50 percent of the electorate. He leads his nearest challenger in the seven-candidate field by 20 percentage points.

If no candidate wins a majority today, a runoff will be held Nov. 28.

Vazquez, 65, who was born in La Teja, was a bright young man whose progress through the educational system in the 1950s was a source of neighborhood pride.

His father, mother and sister all died of cancer, said a family friend, Daniel Mariscano, a communist who goes by the nickname Viejo Pistola, or Old Gun. Vazquez went on to become an oncologist and founded a health clinic for needy residents at the sports club.

In the 1980s, Vazquez became president of the Progreso soccer team and opened a soup kitchen and health clinic at the team headquarters. He won Montevideo's mayoral election in 1989, the same year Progreso won the national soccer championship in an upset.

Long popular in working-class Montevideo, Vazquez has won strong support nationwide, thanks to widespread anger toward the government of outgoing President Jorge Batlle, who cannot run for re-election. The unemployment rate reached 20 percent during Batlle's tenure.

Famous for its large middle class and the highest rates of literacy in Latin America, Uruguay has an official poverty rate of 31 percent. Tens of thousands of young Uruguayans migrate every year to Europe and the United States in search of work.

Most observers believe his presidency would be similar to that of Brazil's leftist leader, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who has won praise from the international financial community for his fiscal discipline.

Vazquez traveled to the United States and Europe this year to reassure financial authorities that, if elected, he would honor the terms of Uruguay's debt restructuring with the International Monetary Fund. Still, he has proposed a series of "emergency" measures, including expanded unemployment benefits and incentives to encourage investment in the fading industrial sector.

On Wednesday, he ended his final campaign speech with the phrase made famous a generation ago by Ernesto "Che" Guevara: "Ever onward to victory!"